Conquest
Early Game Once you've made some headway with production and research on Promision, you'll research Interstellar Travel. This will reveal another planet, and allow you to construct your first ships from the Gear tab at the bottom of the screen. At this point in the game, you will need to send a "Vitha" colony ship to colonise other planets. In order to do this you must build one from the gear tab, go to orbiting fleets within your fleets tab (Star tab at the top of the screen), and move the fleet to the next planet. You should see the fleet in your travelling fleets tab, and once the journey is complete, the fleet will return to orbiting fleets, but over the next planet. Now, you can select the fleet, and choose colonise from the right of the screen, which will consume your Vitha. You will then be able to build on the new planet, but in order to do this, you'll need to transport some resources over. If you want to save some time, you can send them at the same time as your Vitha, you just won't be able to unload and build until you colonise the planet. Hostile Planets: After the first few undefended planets, you will encounter enemy planets. You can send ships to scout the planets by moving a fleet to the planet you're interested in. Don't worry about losing your fleet, the enemy fleet will not auto-engage your fleet. You will then be able to compare the strength of the enemy fleets, and decide how to engage them most effectively. This is where Vitha become useless, from now on, you will conquer planets instead of colonising them, so you won't need any particular ship to do this - any ship can do it. How to battle enemy fleets: ALWAYS EXPORT A SAVE BEFORE ATTACKING IF YOU ARE NOT SURE WHAT YOU'RE DOING. The game's battle calculations are fairly complex, and not many people understand them fully. But in summary: Defence: * Fleets are comprised of "clusters" of ship types, for example a fleet made up of 100 Ark 22 and 100 Ark 55 has 2 clusters. * Damage is dealt proportional to the relative weight of a "cluster" - a heavy cluster will receive the most damage. This is useful if you want to protect lightly armoured ships such as Luxis. * Next, armour provides a base damage reduction, and in early game the enemy will far outclass you on this - as they often have a single strong ship, whereas your fleet will have many ships with low armour. Unlike power, armour reduction is calculated per ship, it doesn't add up - exactly how you'd expect it to in real life. ** If you load armour onto your ships (Mid-game), this will multiply the armour of each ship, which will increase that ship-type's damage reduction. You will lose half of the ammo loaded after the end of the battle. * The damage left after the reduction from armour is then affected by the relative speed difference of ships. Think of it as "Evasion" - A faster ship will evade damage from slower ships, and a faster ship will be more accurate against slower ships. ** Loading engines onto your fleet (Late-game) will increase the speed of each stack, affecting damage accordingly. You will not lose engines because of any losses in battle, unless your entire fleet is destroyed. * The leftovers after those calculations will damage each of your clusters, and you'll lose ships according to this. Offence: * Your fleet's strength is called Power - This value is how much damage output your fleet is capable of. If a battle lasts more than one round, this will get lower each round as ships die - so it is good to try and make battles as short as possible by having an overpowered fleet compared to the enemy - as many enemy fleets are largely made up of one strong ship that won't weaken over the course of the battle like yours will. * Your power is initially the power of each ship in your fleet added together. * Then, it is multiplied by the effect of Ammo (Which is calculated on a logarithmic scale with diminishing returns) * Then, that number is multiplied by the effect of U-Ammo (Which is twice as effective as Ammo, but also on the same logarithmic scale) * Once you unlock Alkantara, they will multiply your power again, and again with diminishing returns. * All ammo and U ammo that you load onto your ships will be used after the end of the battle, but it will continue to increase your damage during the battle even if it lasts many rounds. * If a cluster is destroyed, the leftover damage before armour and speed reductions gets passed on to the stack below it in full, where it is then affected by that stack's armour and speed reduction. Tactics * There isn't really such thing as an ideal ship combination, but the cost/benefit of each ship type is different. In general, the best value for money seems to be Babayaga and Alkantara, in particular because they require different resources. But if you cannot afford those or have not unlocked them, feel free to pad out your fleet with Ark-22 and Ark-55, particularly early game. Muralla can be very useful for reducing your losses too. * Always try to overpower the enemy fleet substantially, it will really reduce your losses if you keep battles to 1 or 2 rounds, meaning you can attack your next planet more quickly. * There are some issues with carry-over damage if a cluster dies, so try not to let that happen if you can help it. * You can "simulate" a battle by exporting your save, attacking the enemy, and importing your save again. You can do this to make sure that you're happy with the losses that you're going to suffer.